Sunday, March 11, 2012

Some Helpful Tips to Engage Online Conversation…

On any given subject matter, everyone has, and is entitled, to an opinion – everybody likes to share their opinion with others, including businesses. Here are a few helpful tips to engage on online conversation:

1.  Post a survey, poll or open-ended question on Facebook asking customers to identify their biggest challenge or most pressing concern related to your (or their) business.  If anything unexpected, insightful, trend-spotting or controversial bubbles up, use those ideas to spur other conversations.

2.  Send out a thought-provoking question related to your industry.  Make it something people care about — an interesting trend, results of study, a surprising report or something in the news. Link back to more info on your website, blog or Facebook page. As I have previously written about, use Twitter HashTag, which mark keywords or topics in tweets, to keep track of the conversation.

3.  Intersect the results of your social conversations with customers into your content, across media channels. Good conversations seed good content, and vice versa. Write about things that people will want to talk about and share on their social networks.

Social consumers want to engage and interact with businesses in two-way conversation. Be sure that once you start a discussion, you are present to monitor and participate in it.

Of course, some efforts to engage consumers will be more successful than others. We are all trying our hardest to discover what resonates with and engages our audience – of course, this is not always going to be predictable.  Try experimenting to determine what sticks and naturally, what you share and how you share it is up to you.

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